


That I Might Tear It From Me

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aged-Up Character, Camping, Depressing, Kink Meme, M/M, egregious use of folktales, palfriend handjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat and John attempt to come to terms with Karkat's flushcrush during a camping trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That I Might Tear It From Me

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/11895.html?thread=22062967#t22062967) at the Homesmut kink meme for a prompt asking for John/Karkat awkward one-night stand.
> 
> The folktale Karkat is discussing has a human analogue in the folktale of the “Giant who had no heart in his body.”

John's stomach growls. Karkat blinks up at the roof of the tent in annoyance.

"Sorry!" John whispers, and giggles.

Karkat says nothing.

The sleeping bag next to his rustles, and John's face intrudes on his field of vision. "Karkat, are you asleep?"

"Not after the way you did your fucking best to act like an air raid siren next to my aural sponge clots," Karkat says. "I'm surprised it could make its way out of your windhole, given how far your quintafurcated non-gripping appendage must be stuck down it."

John grins. Karkat closes his eyes and tries not to think about how nice it is to see John in darkness, instead of the near-painful brightness that humans require to see anything at all. John is organ-stopping like this, Karkat's vascular muscle trying to take the night off to stare at how nice John looks. Stupid John and his stupid messier-than-usual hair and the streak of dirt on one cheek from building the fire and stupid huge blunt-toothed smile and his stupid long-fingered musician's gripping appendages that Karkat was watching all evening, and stupid Karkat for falling in flush with him.

"You're just trying to be an ass," John says casually, and flops down next to him. Karkat turns his head, and yes, this is that kind of situation, because John is watching him, and now they're watching each other -

Every rom-com would have them kiss, right now. Either that or it would be the moment where they both think about kissing but are interrupted.

A humorously-timed cholerbear does not crash onto their tent. Karkat swallows. John's eyes flick down, possibly to Karkat's lips, and then back to his eyes.

And Karkat, knowing that he's going to curse himself for everything in ten seconds, wiggles forward in his travel recuperacoon sack, slime squishing pleasantly around him, and rests his forehead against John's chest, right under his chin. He's using John's arm as a pillow, actually.

John smells like tree sap and alien pheromones and burned things, and Karkat breathes in and holds it and holds it, and just about dies of miserable futile hope when John wraps his arms around him through the travel recuperacoon sack.

"Your hair is all goopy."

This is so patently obvious that Karkat doesn't respond. His foodflap is right up against the soft skin at the base of John's throat, and from this close he can see it throbbing with John's pulse.

If Karkat were the kind of self-indulgent seedrinser who cheated on his quadrants he might be tempted to let the steady beat of John's bloodpusher lull him into calm, but he isn't, and it doesn't, really. He wants to do things to speed it up. Not the kinds of things he used to be able to do in the game, the kind that means there's steel cylinders in his future.

Karkat wiggles, shifting position in his recuperacoon sack, and it puts him lined up against John, albeit through two layers of sleepsacks, and yes, his thinkpan should be shot through with chemicals and made colorful pictures out of to show wigglers the state you have to be in to fall in flush for a human who is _not a homosexual_.

"This is stupid," Karkat says, shoving away. "We are kidding nobody in this fractalscopic möbian paradox sesquiverse. I am following after you like the most pathetic and unpitiable one-legged barkbeast with a half-eaten face and a turgid bulge in existence, and you are either completely devoid of even an attohint of awareness, in which case your brain should be evicted from your thinkpan in the hopes of creating an improvement, or you are deliberately pretending you lack that attohint of awareness, in which case you are doing me the worst disservice known to the economies of two planets, one of them being a hodgepodge of whatever miserable inapproximations of functioning economies your species can handle. And I am sick of it."

"I don't know why you're so upset about me turning you down, but seriously, it's not my problem that you have a huge thing for me and I'm not interested!"

"Oh my god, why is your foodflap open, even by your own social norms," Karkat starts, but before he can totally ruin everything forever he lurches forward and kisses John.

Well, tries to, anyway. It's more like his fangs are the _Ayem-Seht-Seht Titanigantic_ and John's teeth are an unexpected gas giant. John grunts in pain, but Karkat ignores the horrible stinging in his own foodflap to mash his lips up against John's before burying his head against John's neck and waiting for something awful to happen.

"Ow what was that for!" John pushes at Karkat's shoulders. "You just tried to punch me in the mouth with your face why would you do that? You're such an asshole, Karkat!"

"It was a kiss, grubfucker! Not that I could expect you to know that because you're a complete waste of romantic potential." He kicks John through their respective sleepsacks. "Here's a great idea. Why don't I give you my bloodpusher and you can feed it to a fish so I don't have to use it anymore –"

"Wait, what?"

"Excuse me for not having the fucking jeweled box and the whale, because not all of us can be rich as Croegus and some of us have to tear our quadrants out on a budget."

John chokes. "What?"

"Never mind." Karkat squinches away from John and rolls over to face the green tent wall.

"No, really!" John says.

"No, shut up, I want to talk about this like I want to talk about the grace and glory of the Condesce-that-Was."

There's a long pause, then rustling and the sound of a zipper, and John is kneeling next to Karkat's sleepsack.

"She was a pretty intense lady, you know," John says.

"If you keep talking I am going to rip your tongue out with my claws and feed it to any beasts wandering nearby."

"They have a low realness attribute around here," John points out, and then he's unzipping Karkat's sleepsack. The sopor slime puddles at the bottom, near Karkat's feet.

" _I'll_ eat it."

"You don't even like raw meat," John says. Karkat hates, hates, hates the way all of this is John just exploiting Karkat's flushcrush on him, not that that's a new thing at all, doesn't even rate on the top ten list of things as exciting as ways of slicing grubloaf. He hates that he doesn't hate John at all.

"Who says it'll be raw?" But that's a pretty fruitless conversational tree-lined path, and now John's gripping appendage is resting on the center of Karkat's thorax, right over his bloodpusher. All warm, even through the chilling wetness of sopor slime.

"What do you mean, tearing a quadrant out on a budget? Coral?"

" _The Seadweller Who Had No Organs in His Body_ ," Karkat says, rolling onto his side away from John and curling into a ball, talking into the back of his grasping appendage. "It's a folktale. There's this troll, and all the other members of her workgroup get wrongfully culled via drowning by a seadweller while they're off carousing and she's watching the fields. So she goes off to find out what happened to them, and on the way she helps some lusus. When she gets there she finds the seadweller's kismesis, whom he's locked up and is abusing, and they become moirails. So she goes on a quest to find a way to kill the seadweller, and through a completely unsurprising twist of fate discovers that the lusus she helped are actually the seadweller's other three quadrants, whom he mistreated and transformed into animals – this is a folktale, of course there's ridiculous magic – and through various shenanigans they discover that each of the "lusus" has inside them one of the seadweller's organs – the one that corresponds to the quadrant – and if she kills all of them to get at the organs, she can kill the seadweller. He turned his matesprit into a whale and fed her a coral box with his bloodpusher in it."

John makes a strange noise, like he means to say something but can't quite manage it. "Bloodpusher is for matesprit?"

Karkat nods.

"O...kay then." Outside the tent, somewhere in the trees, some bugs are chirruping. Karkat keeps silent. His don't mean the same things, and John really hates it when Karkat talks to roaches trying to set up colonies in John's cookingblock. Besides, roaches don't understand quadrants, and the noise he wants to make, _I am miserable and you are here,_ is more a flushed mating call than anything else.

John's grasping appendage sets onto Karkat's shoulder. "You...don't hate me."

Karkat reaches for an insult, but the words turn to dust in his foodflap. "No." Then he stops, because he is too genre-savvy to submit to narrative hoofbeastshit like a distressed highblood in a fairytale. "I'm flushed for you, but you have a fetish for women even if my feelings are in a quadrant you can better approximate. So, let's just go to the 'let's be weird about everything' stage tonight, and then tomorrow you can be weird about it some more, and very soon we will not like each other at all, and that will be the end of things. I have accepted my fate." He hurts, in the numb way that means he hasn't realized exactly how much it hurts yet.

John's fingers are very warm, sliding slowly along Karkat's collarbone, towards his neck. "That's self-defeating."

"Tell me I'm wrong, then."

"You're wrong. You told me about your hatecrush on me and that didn't wreck our friendship."

Karkat wants to shake him. "You're forgetting that every single instance of our interaction has been, to me, a result of my empirically first conversation with you."

John pauses, his fingers resting over the pulse in Karkat's neck. "And you think it was awkward after that on my part?"

Karkat stays silent, and John stays touching him, until finally John says, "Look, okay, I don't like guys, but we're friends, and friends can do this. So you have to not be weird about it, okay, because I'm not – I'm just helping you out."

"What?"

"I'm gonna give you a handjob."

"What?!"

"C'mon, don't be stupid, just lie there and enjoy it."

"No, oh my God, this is ridiculous, no, what is your thinkpan," Karkat starts, and sits up, but John touches his arm, then his chest, and Karkat does want this, so he reaches down, shoves down the shorts he was wearing for decency while he slept.

John's gripping appendage slides down his side, falls to his hip, and then to between his legs, warm and dry and -

"What?" John says. "Are you actually a girl?"

"No, oh my God, shut up, it's not unsheathed yet," Karkat snarls, and slides his gripping appendage under John's. "It won't come out for a while."

"Wait you mean like you're a kid?"

"No I mean like you're really shitty at getting your friends off!"

John makes an angry grunting noise and pushes Karkat onto his back, then says, "Okay, if I'm so bad at it, you show me how."

"That's what I was going to do." Normally there's this thing called foreplay that humans don't seem to do – at least not from the videos he's seen on the internet – so it's not really all that surprising that John doesn't have any idea how to get a troll (Karkat!) off.

Of course, he seriously doubts that John wants to kiss, or touch him all that much, or even give him a leg to hump, so instead he presses his palm against the tight muscles between his legs, rocks down against it, and again, feels John's fingers sliding between his and adding pressure. It feels good, even if it is sort of dry, and soon enough there's a rhythm to it.

After a couple of minutes of that, his muscles finish relaxing, and his bulge starts to unsheathe, sliding out slowly.

John pulls Karkat's grippng appendage away and touches that, then. Strokes along it with just his fingertips - it's not out enough for more than that – and his fingers are dry, pulling at the sensitive skin of Karkat's bulge and it's uncomfortable but not terrible, so Karkat lets him, unsheathing slow and a little bit at a time until John's fingers are wrapped all the way around him, and, okay, yes this would be nice except –

John tries to give him a full stroke but his palm catches and it _hurts_.

"Ow ow ow stop what the fuck," Karkat says, "you people can't even use lube what is wrong with you!"

And, well, sopor slime's good enough, really, so he smears that over his bulge even though it's going to make him stupid and sleepy all day tomorrow, more than usual during the soft Earth daytime, because he really, really does want this to work.

It feels really weird, and pretty good, and he just wants, wants John to never stop touching him, like this, and he closes his eyes and holds his voice inside his thorax, not wanting John to hear, until the heat and the sensation are nearly too much, and he remembers –

"Bucket!"

John freezes, gripping appendage still on him. "Where?"

"We don't have one!"

"...can't you, just,"

"No, that's gross," and John's touch is gone, and Karkat is screamingly aroused, so much it hurts, but all he says is, "I guess I just...won't finish."

"That's stupid," John says, and reaches between Karkat's legs again, grip too tight at first – Karkat winces – and then back to tolerable, and two more strokes before Karkat spills into his own sleepsack, red and wet.

John wipes his gripping appendage on Karkat's shorts and says, "Feel better?"

Karkat has to swallow before he can talk, and he wants to say _no_ , but that's not what John wants to hear.

"What do you think?" he says belligerently instead, and John grins, painfully bright, and lies back down in his own sleepsack.

"Glad I could help!" John says. "Sleep tight, buddy!"

Karkat bends one knee, feeling the stickiness of his own genetic material drying against his skin, and really wishes he could hate John, since all he can feel right now is hatred for himself for going along with it.

\---

In the morning, he wakes up long after John does.

He picks the dried flakes of genetic material off his skin, though that's sort of a lost cause until they go back home and he can use the ablution trap, and he gets up and gets dressed. Goes outside to find John sitting in front of a small fire, heating up sausages.

Karkat snatches one off the pan, holds it between his teeth so it'll cool, and sits down next to John. A little closer than even human ideas of personal space.

(The seam of his jeans rubs up against the closed muscles between his legs, and he remembers, too vividly, John touching him in the darkness.)

"Hungry?" John asks.

Karkat chews a bite of the sausage, holding the rest between two claws, and says nothing. His side prickles with the proximity to John.

"You wanna get the bread ready for toasting?" John asks.

Karkat goes and gets the loaf of bread, brings it back.

"You're really quiet," John says. "Something wrong?"

The air smells like pine and fire and meat. "Last night," Karkat starts.

"Whoah, whoah, I told you, friend stuff, water under the bridge," John says, leaning back to look up at him, something hurt in his expression. "I don't want to talk about it because it'll just make things weird, and I want us to still be friends."

"Right," Karkat says. He doesn't say, _Because ignoring something always makes it heal up, right, I think it's about time to amputate this relationship before it goes gangrenous and kills one or both of us and we undergo social deaths screaming with platonic vomit in our olfactory bulbs and our windholes stopped up with the mucous of denial,_ because saying it wouldn't help anything at all.


End file.
